01 Editorial.qxd Editorial The editorial management of a scientific journal is a very rewarding task, but also a very arduous one, as much time and effort needs to be devoted to maintaining and improving the quality of the journal. The readers of this journal may know that Dr. Ana Bocanegra Valle stood down as the editor of Ibérica after two 4-year periods – the maximum span the journal statutes allow. I would like to express my gratitude to her for her interest and dedication in making Ibérica reach international visibility and high quality standards. The journal is covered by prestigious international and national databases, directories and index lists and was designated as “excellent scientific journal” and awarded a certificate and seal of excellence by the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology (FECYT) in 2011. The journal renewed the seal of excellence in 2013. This new spring issue attests not only the European dimension of the journal but also its fully international dimension. It should be acknowledged here that the review process and the revision of the manuscripts compiled in the issue were entirely managed by the former editor, Dr. Bocanegra. A new editorial team has taken over for Ibérica and found in Dr. Bocanegra invaluable guidance in these first few months in which this new team has been managing the editorial tasks. On behalf of the members of this team, I thank Dr. Bocanegra for her support and generous expertise. I would also like to express my gratitude to my colleagues in this team, Dr. Concepción Orna (Associate Editor) and Dr. Oana Maria Carciu and Dr. Diana Giner (Assistant Editors). All of them teach languages for academic and professional languages and they are all published authors in Ibérica. They very readily showed their willingness to collaborate in the editorial duties of the journal when I asked them to join the team. My special thanks to the three of them in this first issue for a successful accomplishment of all the editorial tasks. This new issue contains 9 original research articles and 4 book reviews. The selected articles provide testimony that the scope of the field of Languages for Specific Purposes is wide-ranging and relevant, both theoretically and pedagogically. As I briefly summarize below, the issue illustrates the wealth of research interests and approaches to the understanding of textual and ibérica 29 (2015): 9-14 iSSN: 1139-7241 / e-iSSN: 2340-2784 9 00 IBERICA 29.qxp:01 Editorial.qxd 30/03/15 22:00 Página 9 contextual aspects of specialised discourses, corpus analysis research and LSP pedagogy. The issue opens with an invited contribution by JOHN FLOwERDEw, from City University of Hong Kong. Flowerdew provides a very insightful critical discussion on several metadiscourse frameworks that have been proposed for the analysis of academic discourse. This author addresses some conceptual and methodological aspects of these frameworks and also takes the case of signalling nouns to contend that this noun category might be incorporated into models of metadiscourse. Following Flowerdew’s contribution, MATTHEw PEACOCK’s original article shows how stance adverbials may play an important role in putting forward claims and propositions in academic prose. Peacock classifies stance adverbials into two main categories, Limitation and Doubt and Certainty, and explains that both are much more prevalent than hitherto suspected in academic writing. Of particular interest is the author’s claim that semantic preference techniques may be a valuable method for corpus-based research on stance in academic writing. In-depth analysis and discussion on both textual and contextual aspects of legal discourse is also illustrated in this issue. RAQUEL TARANILLA’s original article offers careful examination of the differences between the narratives of civil and criminal judgments, with the aim of contributing to the description of the Spanish judgment as a genre. The author focuses on the textual features of the genre of court judgments and provides the reader with an insightful comparison of how proven facts are narrated in a similar way in civil and criminal systems. The original article by ISABEL NEGRO ALOUSQUE applies the cognitive framework to illustrate, based on empirical data, the relevance of metaphor both as a conceptual mechanism underlying political discourse and as an argumentative, ideological, evaluative and persuasive tool. The author offers a detailed textual analysis of the linguistic and conceptual metaphors of Chavez’s political speeches and demonstrates that these metaphors perform persuasively, playing a central role in the construction of Chávez’s self-image as both a political and religious leader. PATRIZIA ANESA and ANTOINETTE FAGE-BUTLER sensibly bring to the forefront the impact of the new technologies in the context of languages for specialised communication. These authors focus on online health forums as a new form of doctor-patient communication. Their article analyses the EDITORIAL ibérica 29 (2015): 9-1410 00 IBERICA 29.qxp:01 Editorial.qxd 30/03/15 22:00 Página 10 types of dialogic and polylogic interactions that occur in this type of communicative event. Adopting a discourse analytical approach, the authors’ analysis illustrates how these forums may be popularizing biomedical knowledge as they are no longer targeted at specialised audience but at a diversified audience. CARMEN PÉREZ-SABATER and BEGOñA MONTERO-FLETA also address the impact of the new technologies, though from the perspective of LSP teaching and learning. Their article describes a very original approach to the use of Twitter for ESP teaching within the context of collaborative learning and blended learning environments. The authors provide detailed explanations of how Twitter can be incorporated into a structured language learning task. They assess the pedagogical advantages of a writing-to-learn activity on Twitter complemented with other activities of the ESP course. BARAMEE KHEOVICHAI’s original article focuses on metaphor scenarios in business discourse. The analysis of these scenarios is based on sound corpus evidence, thus providing a comprehensive basis for the search for exemplification. The article also makes significant additions to and contrasts with the relevant bibliography that the author reviews. Kheovichai’s approach nicely demonstrates how cohesion is constructed in business discourse, deriving from the co-occurrence of related lexical items of the semantic fields in question. The original article by SVEN TARP seeks to systematize, as the author states, the functions registered in economic dictionaries during the past 300 years with a view to presenting some suggestions for the immediate future of online dictionaries. Tarp provides a sound and fundamental reflection on the disciplinary status of economic lexicography and concludes with sensible recommendations for the development of future dictionaries of economics in view of the advent of e-lexicography. The last original article included in this issue, by GIUSEPPINA SCOTTO DI CARLO, looks into the discoursal use of axiological and non-axiological adjectives in online popularisations, namely TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) talks. This author also draws on corpus evidence to explain how the speakers express judgments and take up positions at a textual level by means of evaluative adjectives. This author’s article offers rich reflections on the popularization of scientific knowledge in online multimedia genres. EDITORIAL ibérica 29 (2015): 9-14 11 00 IBERICA 29.qxp:01 Editorial.qxd 30/03/15 22:00 Página 11 Besides these original research articles, this issue contains the reviews of relevant books for Ibérica’s target audience. The first review, by MIGUEL ÁNGEL CAMPOS PARDILLOS, addresses innovative approaches to translation of legal texts (i.e. the volume Legal Translation in Context, edited by Anabel Borja Albi & Fernando Prieto Ramos). The second review, by LUZ GIL-SALOM, provides insightful critical views of issues of personality in legal genres (as discussed in Interpersonality in Legal Genres, a collection of essays edited by Ruth Breeze, Maurizio Gotti & Carmen Sancho Guinda). The readers will also find INMACULADA FORTANET GÓMEZ’s interesting review of Mary Jane Curry & Theresa Lillis’ A Scholar’s Guide to Getting Published in English. Critical Choices and Practical Strategies, a volume which includes useful comments and insights into how to get research published in English-medium scientific journals. Corporate Discourse, by Ruth Breeze, reviewed by JUAN CARLOS PALMER SILVEIRA in this issue, is also a very insightful reading for Ibérica’s audience. Finally, on behalf of the former journal editor, I thank the members of the Editorial Board for their collaboration in the peer-review process of the articles published in this issue. Their suggestions and thorough evaluations of the manuscripts are a key pillar of the excellence of the journal. These have been (in alphabetical order): Elena Bárcena (Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia), María Enriqueta Cortés (Universidad de Almería), Amparo García Carbonell (Universitat Politècnica de València), Rosa Giménez (Universitat de València), Honesto Herrera (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), Maria Kuteeva (Stockholm University, Sweden), Laura M. Muresan (Bucharest University of Economic Studies, Romania), María Ángeles Orts (Universidad de Murcia), Juan Carlos Palmer (Universitat Jaume I), Ramón Plo (Universidad de Zaragoza), Carmen Sancho (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid), Chelo Vargas (Universidad de Alicante) and Michael white (Universidad Complutense de Madrid). Also, I list below the invited external reviewers who have also generously supported the peer-review process during the past six months. On behalf of the former editor, I thank them for their detailed assessment of the manuscripts, as well as for their time and interest in Ibérica. They are, in alphabetical order: Erdem Akbas (Erciyes University, Turkey) Pilar Alberola (Florida Universitària) Moisés Almela (Universidad de Murcia) EDITORIAL ibérica 29 (2015): 9-1412 00 IBERICA 29.qxp:01 Editorial.qxd 30/03/15 22:00 Página 12 Ismael Arinas (Universidad Politécnica de Madrid) Karen Bennett (University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies, Portugal) Daniele Besomi (University of Lausanne, France) Ana Bocanegra (Universidad de Cádiz) Ruth Breeze (Universidad de Navarra) Rosario Caballero (Universidad de Castilla-La Mancha) Pascual Cantos (Universidad de Murcia) Beatriz Cendón (Universidad de Valladolid) Mª José Coperías (Universitat de València) Alejandro Curado (Universidad de Extremadura) Zsófija Demjén (The Open University, UK) Dacia Dressen-Hammouda (Université Blaise Pascal, France) Pedro Fuertes (Universidad de Valladolid) Víctor González (Universidad Las Palmas de Gran Canaria) Maurizio Gotti (University of Bergamo, Italy) Yongyan Li (University of Hong Kong, China) Carmen López Ferrero (Universitat Pompeu Fabra) Hilary Nesi (Coventry University, UK) Matthew Peacock (City University of Hong Kong, China) Anne Räsänen (University of Jyväskylä, Finland) Miguel Ruiz (Universitat Jaume I) Sven Tarp (Aarhus University, Denmark) James wilson (University of Leeds, UK) Christopher williams (University of Foggia, Italy) Ian williams (Universidad de Cantabria) Joseph Zompetti (Illinois State University, US) I hope that the readers find in this issue inspiring and relevant current trends in the analysis of specialised discourses as well as innovative approaches to the teaching/learning of specialised languages. Carmen Pérez-Llantada Universidad de Zaragoza (Spain) llantada@unizar.es Editor-in-chief of Ibérica EDITORIAL ibérica 29 (2015): 9-14 13 00 IBERICA 29.qxp:01 Editorial.qxd 30/03/15 22:00 Página 13